Hello everybody

I am totaly new hear and i hope you all will read this.

The point of this is that I do not feel that “search by relevance” is working as it use to do a week back in time.

And I also think that the “search by relevance” is not as accurate as a week ago.

Try and search “rose child” “ by relevance

http://www.fotolia.com/search?k=rose+child&order=relevance

You will have the results of:
Hand print on paper but no rose
A pink piggybank but no rose
Boots in many colours but no rose but child boots with no child
Child and man but no rose
Small plastic balls but no rose and no child
Then a child with a rose
Pencils no child no rose
Then 3-4 pictures with a child with a rose
Then other not child and rose pictures


As we all know it should be the most important keyword that should be highest ranged.

I have tried to search in my own portfolio.

I searched for “resort”

http://www.fotolia.com/search?p=147197&k=resort

And the first picture in the result list is a picture of a beach with palms. I do have resort in my keywords but it is ranked “NOT as the most important search word but is in the bottom of my ranked keywords. If I search for “beach” it is also not showing the pictures in the order as I have ranked my keywords.

I have tried to move up and down keywords and nothing seams to change. It is like that the rank of the keywords have NO effect as it had one week ago.

I have send this to support at fotolia and asked them about it.

I would like you here at microstockforum to help me. What do you think about it and are your sales better now or worse. I realy hope some one will comment on this because in fotolias forum nobody seamed to care about it. Maby it is just me.

Tanks
Lars

Hi Lars,

My experience with the relevance function on all the sites is that it can be mystifying. Everyone is using algorithms (not even sure I know how to spell that) and assume they vary a bit. I find that my "most popular" image on most sites is some strange and wondrous combination of views, purchases and how recently it went up.

I did do the "rose" and "child" search and the images you mention do have those keywords. I agree that the words seem less than relevant. Maybe a color-challenged illustrator referring to0 the hue of the object presented as "rose"?

My experience is that it is ultimately a numbers game. TRhe more images you have and the more keywords the more images that get purchased. Apologies to those of you who promote concise keywords, I find better success with using as many applicable keywords as I can muster.

Check out Dreamstime's new function where they show you the keywords someone used to intially navigate towards your image. You'll be amazed how often the keywords seem completely irrelevant to the image they ultimately purchased. For instance, recently the keyword "stoner" lead to the purchase of a close-up on a motorcycle wheeel. "Stoner" isn't in my keywords. So somehow the person must have started with "stoner" and then linked visually and liked what they saw when they got to my image.

Go figure.



Cheers,

Scott/Creatista